Australia 2014

ThoughtWorks Live is a by-invitation only executive conference that brings the intersection of business and technology to life.

2014 Highlights

Over 160 Australian executives attended ThoughtWorks Live 2014 in Sydney and Melbourne on the theme ‘Customer engagement’. Speakers from leading brands including Woolworths, Vodafone and realestate.com.au shared insights into how they build customer centric organisations using smart analytics, wearable technology, in-store innovation labs, lean enterprise techniques and more.

Over 160 Australian executives attended ThoughtWorks Live 2014 in Sydney and Melbourne on the theme ‘Customer engagement’. Speakers from leading brands including Woolworths, Vodafone and realestate.com.au shared insights into how they build customer centric organizations using smart analytics, wearable technology, in-store innovation labs, lean enterprise techniques and more.Imagine a turbulent world where the path forward is shaped by your customer. Imagine a world where this is the face of opportunity. Customer engagement has gone through three technology-driven revolutions-- the first for customer service, the second for customer experience, and the third, that we're just entering, right now, is going to revolutionize business, as we use customers to create new value and opportunities. [APPLAUSE] The fact customers are now moving faster to businesses means IT needs to become a strategic capability of your business. It can no longer be seen as a cost center, taken out of the organization, and try to drive it down. But there are also a number of consequences of this fact. We need to start to grow our people-- create an environment where it's safe for them to experiment and learn new skills, while trying to meet the pace of customer demand. [APPLAUSE] At Woolworths, rather than focusing on a traditional metric of trying to increase basket size, we focus on how can we better improve the convenience and speed for our consumer while shopping in stores. Rather than making a big investment and building a self-scanner, we thought we'd test our assumptions with customers in an in-store innovation lab. The interesting thing is that customers couldn't use their self-scanning app as well as hauling a basket. While this is obvious, looking backwards, it's something that wasn't at the start and allowed us to save millions in, potentially, what could have been, ultimately, a mistake. So realestate.com.eu has access to over three million unique users, through our web-based solutions and apps. This gives us unique insight into consumer behavior and activities that we will use analytics and data, in order to provide a more relevant consumer experience. But also relevant messages to those consumers, in terms of advertising that works for both the consumer and the customer. With wearable products, customer engagement doesn't really end at the product purchase; it actually starts way before. So from the idea level, how to take it into a working product and then, from the working product, how to actually manufacture it, ship it to customers, have them hold it and try it, and then generate the data out of this device, how to integrate this data into the ecosystem, and create true meaning out of it.

Presentations

Keynote

Barry O’Reilly

Author, Lean Enterprise

Barry joined ThoughtWorks in the UK after working on several startups and brought this experience to the enterprise where he explores the intersection of business model innovation, product development and organisational culture. This experience has led him to the development of his forthcoming book - suitably named ‘Lean Enterprise‘.

Gary O’Brien

Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Gary specialises in helping executives, teams and individuals to adapt and improve the flow of value using lean and agile principles. He brings a strong emphasis on facilitating organisational change, and the role of management and leadership in an agile world.

Keynote

Hind Hobeika

CEO, Instabeat

Hind is the founder and CEO of Instabeat, an award winning startup developing a heads-up display for swimmers to monitor their workouts, dubbed as the “Google glass meets Nike Fuelband for swimming”. A big believer in the power of technology to improve the quality of life, she is an active member of the Quantified Self organisation, and has founded the Beirut Chapter, becoming a pioneer in the movement’s launch in the Middle East.

In 2012, Hind was selected as one of the top 5 Pan Arab innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review tr35. Instabeat won the best of Wearable Technology at CES 2014, 1st prize of the MIT Enterprise Forum Pan Arab Business Plan competition in 2012, and was chosen as one of the 7 hottest Global startups of 2013 by Forbes.

Dan McClure

Innovation Design Practice Lead, ThoughtWorks

Dan has extensive experience and enthusiasm for blowing up the status quo. He has spent over 30 years as an insurgent innovator for institutions ranging from automotive manufacturers to educational institutions however today he leads the Innovation Design efforts for ThoughtWorks in North America.

Vincent Dempsey

GM of Digital, Vodafone

Vinnie is the General Manager of Digital Channels at Vodafone Australia having spent 17 years in Telco and three years with a major television network. Vinny is a digital leader with experience in marketing, management, product development and online content.

Tiffany Overton

Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Tiff Overton has worked extensively at Vodafone in an engagement that she describes as her favourite gig yet. Originally hailing from Seattle, Washington she honed her craft developing lean healthcare institutions.

Michael Combs

Founder and CEO, CareerTrackers

Michael is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado where he earned a degree in Business Administration with a major in finance, marketing and a minor in legal studies. As a participant in the INROADS internship program for ethnic minorities in the United States, Michael was awarded an internship with Hewlett-Packard for five consecutive summers. On graduation he was offered a full-time position with HP and rose to the executive ranks. During his 10 years with HP his career spanned the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. In 2000 Michael was named a Gates Millennium Scholar, in 2003 was awarded the United States Congressional Medal of Service for community outreach and development and in 2013 was recognised in the inaugural Westpac Community Leaders Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Jonas Jaanimagi

Head of Media Strategy & Operations, realestate.com.au

Jonas joined REA Group as Head of Media in July 2012 although his digital career began in 1999 when he joined a start-up financial publisher with three people, which was sold eight years later having grown to an organisation of some 100 staff. Jonas then founded and launched WebAds UK, a specialist UK business and finance digital ad-sales house representing publishers exclusively as a niche high-net-worth proposition. After successfully driving the business to profitability, Jonas was head-hunted by Hi-Media, Europe’s largest independent ad network with access to more than 150 million unique users. Prior to joining REA, Jonas worked at Videology as the Director of Product Management.

Jennifer Smith

Technology Consultant, ThoughtWorks

After spending many years at ThoughtWorks' London office, Jen is now a consultant at ThoughtWorks Melbourne. Although her background is in web development, these days she is concentrating on data and analysis thereof and is extremely excited about the potential for data to change the way we build and design products through experimentation and testing.

Lee Venaruzzo

Agile Program Manager, Woolworths

As the executive lead responsible for the Agile transformation of Australia's largest retailer, Lee brings experience from a variety of roles including program and product management, operations and finance. His focus on creating space for teams has led to a proven track record of successful delivery.

Wayne Ryan

Business Support Manager, Woolworths

Wayne is the driving force behind the small stores division and the leader for innovation at Woolworths. Understanding that true competitive advantage comes through his people, Wayne has driven a culture of experimentation, which gives his brands the ability to respond to and lead the market through a combination of distributed decision making contrasted with congruent execution.

Zhamak Dehghani

Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Zhamak Dehghani works with ThoughtWorks as a principal consultant, currently focusing on system architecture for continuous delivery. Zhamak has worked as a software engineer and architect for 15 years in the areas of distributed computing communications at the intersection of hardware and software.

Andy Marks

Technical Principal, ThoughtWorks

Andy Marks is one of ThoughtWorks longest serving ThoughtWorkers in Australia having been with the company since 2002. Currently working in Melbourne building a technology research consortium, Andy has spent most of his ThoughtWorks career leading development teams both in Australia and in Singapore.